Tag Archives: language

Guns or Cancer, Which is Better?

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I don’t normally write about guns, but soon it will be gun violence awareness day, so it seems appropriate to throw my two cents in. After all, I like shooting guns, and I like talking about the law. Plus, you know, I have a terminal cancer diagnosis, so it just kind of makes sense.

I recently read two similar news stories about a pair of women who were killed mere days apart: one was deliberately shot by a stranger after leaving a rural vacation spot, and another was shot in the back when her toddler found a gun in the car while they were driving. Pure coincidence that both of those happened close together in Wisconsin, a state I used to live just over the border from, and happened within a week of each other with two mothers being shot and killed while driving with their children in the car. Otherwise, one was a presumably intentional (if random) murder by a horrible person, the other a very random (and presumably inadvertent) act by an innocent.

I’d love to say that the random shooting of mothers by their small children was a complete outlier, but it isn’t. Sadly, this sort of thing happens far too frequently, even among responsible gun-owners and pro-gun advocates — even while they are driving. Of course, not all toddlers who come across guns shoot their mothers. Sometimes, and I find this part deeply, deeply sad, they simply shoot themselves because a loaded gun was within reach. (For those of you who did not or could not click that last link, it details four cases where toddlers shot and killed themselves during the same week last month, in addition to five non-fatal accidental shootings by minors.)

And that is a clear example of what is wrong with current gun regulation. Continue reading Guns or Cancer, Which is Better? →

Girls Literature and the Culture of What’s Wrong With Me?

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I have a daughter and I care what she reads. From her earliest days, books have been an important part of her life. She’s ten now and I still read to her regularly, though she reads voraciously on her own (and far more than I ever was able as a child, since she reads like lightning when left to her own device-free devices). That kid can devour stories, though lately has taken to being very choosy with her time. If a book doesn’t hook her, it goes back to the library unfinished. She wants to be sucked in; once she is engaged she absolutely must finish. Because it matters, I am always concerned with the messages in the stories she finds most enticing.

When she chooses her books, her mother and I try to be aware of the content and whether there is an underlying theme of “what’s wrong with me?” running through the pages. More and more, it seems easy to identify this theme almost as its own genre in children’s and specifically girls’ literature. The seeds of necessary therapy are sown implicitly between the lines as books for these young readers guide them to feeling less than adequate, training them for a life of unnecessarily pursuing products to fix themselves. This is a predictable byproduct of corporate America, where publishing is largely controlled by conglomerates that feed revenue streams in any way possible. Branding and downstream profits are the backbone of our consumer culture. But feeding this beast is optional. Continue reading Girls Literature and the Culture of What’s Wrong With Me? →

Death in Threes and the Power of Words

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The common saying is that “they come in threes.” We’re talking about celebrity deaths, of course, and although this is typically the sort of nonsense that can be justified simply by shifting the period of inclusion so it always appears to be accurate, there is something eerily unique about this past week. Within nine days, we have had three prominent people of the same age whose deaths are blamed on cancer.

First, we had Ellen Stovall, age 69 and president of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship. Technically, she died from complications related to cardiac disease, but the cause of her heart trouble is traced back to treatments she underwent 45 years ago for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. According to her obituary in the New York Times, she had a recurrence of the lymphoma in the 80s and then also discovered that she had breast cancer — about this time she also discovered a pamphlet from the organization she would later be president of, which introduced her to the term “survivor” as a replacement for the word that had been commonly used to describe cancer patients: victim. This subtle adjustment of language helped to give her drive and focus and to become a force in the next wave of cancer awareness. She died on January 5th.

Next came the news on January 10th that David Jones, better known as David Bowie, had died after an 18 month “battle” with an undisclosed cancer just two days after his 69th birthday. While his family declined to offer details, it was reported by the New York Times that the director of Lazarus, Bowie’s Broadway collaboration, mentioned liver cancer in an interview with Danish media. Whether this meant the cancer originated in the liver or had merely settled in that organ is not clear, keeping in tune with the varied enigmatic personas the performer was known for. However, not knowing the type of cancer adds not just to the mystique of David Bowie, but the general fear and uncertainty that the word “cancer” conjures on its own. Continue reading Death in Threes and the Power of Words →

Truth, Peace and Holiday Values

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The holiday season is upon us. Traditionally this is a time for reflection on our values, both our personal values and those shared by society at large. We are also in the midst of a heated political campaign season, made divisive largely through a fearful shift throughout our culture. Because these holidays, pretty universally across religious boundaries, are focused on peace, it seems like a good time to consider some of the foundational concepts that have created the divisiveness we are experiencing. By addressing some of these, perhaps the peace we aspire to will be easier to grasp for all of us.

The topics of gun control, national security and terrorism, taxes, healthcare and climate change are issues we all agree are important to our society. Ideological divides often prevent productive conversations on these issues, largely because we, as a society, are quite uninformed about the facts underlying each issue. And our politicians frequently do not help this situation, preferring to fan the fires of discontent rather than address issues in an open and honest fashion. We, however, as cognizant and inquisitive humans, have the ability to sidestep the easy rhetoric and parroting of sound bytes in order to debate issues in a civil manner not currently reflected by many high-profile politicians and certainly not reflected by most pundits in the media. Continue reading Truth, Peace and Holiday Values →

Perspective: One of the Greatest Gifts of a Cancer Diagnosis

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I was skulking around the house last week, ruminating on just how bad I smelled. My wife was getting annoyed with me, insisting that I did not smell any differently; it was a hot, stagnant summer day and I was sweating (I felt) profusely. My chemo treatment was beginning to purge from my system and it seemed to me that as I would walk around a corner or even just turn my head, I would get a wiff of something nasty, putrid, sour. And I couldn’t shake it — that smell was just plain bad.

But it couldn’t be identified, or even located. And I was the only one smelling it.

Then I started to take stock of all my symptoms, which I do now and then as both a way of monitoring my body and keeping a sense of humor about the process. Because it can be pretty gross. Let’s face it, no one likes to think of themselves covered in puss-filled sores, hobbling about on swollen feet and wafting fetid breezes from God knows where throughout the room. Continue reading Perspective: One of the Greatest Gifts of a Cancer Diagnosis →

Narratives Matter, Beginning to End

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On the heels of a recent discussion on changing the Narrative of Cancer as a means to enable better communication and understanding with regard to the hundreds of cancer variants, I came across a very interesting article on a closely related topic: changing the Narrative of Dying. Far from being a depressing or downbeat approach, the article discusses the need for reevaluating our collective understanding of the “end of life” process in order to facilitate a healthier and happier means for saying our goodbyes without forgetting that, until the last moment, we are all still living and participating in this world. It touches on some important ideas, pivoting about the notion that our system, our society, marginalizes and fears death and, more specifically, the process of dying. Yet, death is as much a part of our existence as birth.
Continue reading Narratives Matter, Beginning to End →

Enemies Are Bad

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In my quest to reframe the narrative on Cancer, I sometimes feel that there are few voices in the media that support my views. How refreshing, then, when a friend points me in the direction of a piece like this brief podcast. It takes the edge off the words blazing across the publications set out at the oncology waiting rooms across the nation.

The Magazine "Cure" for cancer patients, survivors and caregivers, and a flier for Breast Cancer Survivors
Actual magazines and fliers from a waiting room

I am not saying that patients are not allowed to view themselves as survivors if that is somehow empowering to them and their particular struggle, but the term is another example of the “war metaphor” that dominates the dialogue and casts the cancer “battle” in a negative, pre-defeated light.

Like too many things in our media culture, the narrative on cancer has been driven in a lazy and convenient fashion for many years. Certainly when the War on Cancer was declared by President Nixon over 40 years ago, it was an apt analogy. Cancer research was still in its relative infancy, even after half a century of good scientific inquiry and thousands of years of anecdotal analysis, folk medicine and traditional therapies being attempted. Since 1971, the story has been changing, evolving on an almost constant basis.

Continue reading Enemies Are Bad →

Language Is Your Enemy: Why Terminology Matters

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Our culture has recently dipped into a new low when it comes to the context of our words. One could blame Twitter or the general dumbing down of literature or reality TV, but the sad implication of our times is that society has largely grown intellectually lazy. This is hugely important to understand, because, like it or not we still communicate predominantly with words. Emoji simply cannot express the full range of our experience, and even if they could, eventually it would be clear that they are still just avatars for words or expressions and our verbal language still matters.

But why does terminology matter so much?

Let us examine one word so often used to describe the cancer patient who is living beyond his or her treatment and consider why it is so insidious: survivor.
Continue reading Language Is Your Enemy: Why Terminology Matters →